Differential privacy and its application

 While the thesis reports our research in extending the theory of differential privacy to real world application, many interesting and promising issues remain unexplored. This thesis can be a starting point for new challenges because they precisely demonstrate how differential privacy can be extended in real-world scenarios

Disclosure of Agency Legal Materials

This proposed recommendation identifies statutory reforms that, if enacted by Congress, would provide clear standards as to what legal materials agencies must publish and where they must publish them (whether in the Federal Register, on their websites, or elsewhere). The amendments would also account for technological developments and correct certain statutory ambiguities and drafting errors. The objective of these amendments would be to ensure that agencies provide ready public access to important legal materials in the most efficient way possible. Professor Bernard W. Bell (Rutgers Law School), Professor Cary Coglianese (University of Pennsylvania Law School), Professor Michael Eric Herz (Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law), Professor Margaret Kwoka (Ohio State University Moritz College of Law), and Professor Orly Lobel (University of San Diego School of Law) are serving as the consultants for this project. Professor Kwoka is serving as the lead consultant. An Ad Hoc Committee, co-chaired by Public Member Aaron Nielson and Government Member Roxanne Rothschild, considered this project in spring 2023

ACADEMIC LANGUAGE FUNCTIONS IN CLIL DISCOURSE: A CLASSROOM BASED RESEARCH

David Marsh (1994) refers to content and language integrated learning (CLIL) as \u201csituations where subjects, or parts of subjects, are taught through a foreign language with dual-focused aims, namely the learning of content, and the simultaneous learning of a foreign language\u201d. Nowadays, CLIL is implemented in a wide variety of educational contexts all over Europe, thus becoming the approach that best provides opportunities for effective second language learning (Lyster 2007). In this new CLIL scenario Italy represents a vanguard. The Reform of the Italian secondary school system (2010) made the implementation of CLIL teaching in at least one foreign language compulsory from the third year of upper secondary language schools and in the last year of schooling. Given its potential for the improvement of learners\u2019 language competences, CLIL discourse is viewed as an interesting area of investigation. It is from these premises that this classroom-based research aims to investigate the extent to which the teaching of scientific school subjects through English can foster the use of the micro academic language function (ALF) of hypothesising as a tool for the process of constructing meaning. The study, which is the first attempt to analyse teacher discourse in the recent Italian context, reports on data collected in 45 lessons in 5 different scientific subjects: Biology, Chemistry, Earth Science, Mathematics, and Physics, taught in three upper-secondary language schools in Milan from February 2015 to January 2016. The analysis aims to investigate in particular how much hypothesising there is in scientific-subject CLIL lessons, how the function of hypothesising occurs and how it is linguistically realized across the lessons. Data have been analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively and compared among the subjects and the CLIL teachers, when possible. Insights from this study aim to contribute to highlighting some issues related to the incidence of hypotheses and their use across different scientific-subject CLIL lessons. In particular, the findings could encourage the CLIL teachers to strengthen their language awareness and efficacy in the second language acquisition process in CLIL lessons, at least with regards to the verbalization of hypotheses. In addition, since findings have to do with the first generation of officially trained CLIL teachers in Italy, this study might well be taken into account by academics and researchers involved in designing language and methodology training for CLIL teachers where there is also an interest in directing the trainee\u2019s attention to the use of ALFs in the CLIL context

Grounding semantic cognition using computational modelling and network analysis

The overarching objective of this thesis is to further the field of grounded semantics using a range of computational and empirical studies. Over the past thirty years, there have been many algorithmic advances in the modelling of semantic cognition. A commonality across these cognitive models is a reliance on hand-engineering “toy-models”. Despite incorporating newer techniques (e.g. Long short-term memory), the model inputs remain unchanged. We argue that the inputs to these traditional semantic models have little resemblance with real human experiences. In this dissertation, we ground our neural network models by training them with real-world visual scenes using naturalistic photographs. Our approach is an alternative to both hand-coded features and embodied raw sensorimotor signals. We conceptually replicate the mutually reinforcing nature of hybrid (feature-based and grounded) representations using silhouettes of concrete concepts as model inputs. We next gradually develop a novel grounded cognitive semantic representation which we call scene2vec, starting with object co-occurrences and then adding emotions and language-based tags. Limitations of our scene-based representation are identified for more abstract concepts (e.g. freedom). We further present a large-scale human semantics study, which reveals small-world semantic network topologies are context-dependent and that scenes are the most dominant cognitive dimension. This finding leads us to conclude that there is no meaning without context. Lastly, scene2vec shows promising human-like context-sensitive stereotypes (e.g. gender role bias), and we explore how such stereotypes are reduced by targeted debiasing. In conclusion, this thesis provides support for a novel computational viewpoint on investigating meaning - scene-based grounded semantics. Future research scaling scene-based semantic models to human-levels through virtual grounding has the potential to unearth new insights into the human mind and concurrently lead to advancements in artificial general intelligence by enabling robots, embodied or otherwise, to acquire and represent meaning directly from the environment

RISK ASSESSMENT, COUNTER-TERRORISM LAW & POLICY; A HUMAN RIGHTS-BASED ANALYSIS: Assessing the UK’s Pre-emptive and Preventative Measures of Countering Terrorism, Interaction with Article 5 and 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Potential Role of Risk Assessment

The terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 had a significant impact upon how governments counter terrorism. The UK introduced and implemented an array of measures, each taking a pre-emptive and preventative approach, to tackle terrorism. The change in counter-terrorism law and policy post-9/11 has, as this thesis will show, increasingly become reliant upon fear-based risk and uncertainty rather than evidence-based guilt. This thesis will examine some of those UK measures used post-9/11, which were seen as some of the more controversial measures. When analysing each measure there will be an assessment of the human rights issues associated with those measures, specifically under Article’s 5 and 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The assessment of these rights with each measure will provide a legal understanding of the wider academic and legal implication of those measures, these include the right to a fair trial. Having assessed the human rights implications of each measure, a risk assessment is undertaken. This enables further analysis of each measure and holistically identifies the wider risk implications of such counter terrorism measures. Such risks may include negative perceptions of the police, the UK or provide indirect support for the radicalisation of new terrorists. This process is developed within the thesis and becomes known as the ‘tri-relationship'. Throughout, the measures examined will be seen to erode those human rights principles ordinarily guaranteed by the criminal justice system, for example liberty. Instead, the measures give way to a new counter-terrorism justice system which has become increasingly normalised by the measures introduced and accepted by the courts. This is despite the implications on human rights and risks involved. This thesis will show that the measures introduced by the UK to achieve securitization, fail to achieve the long-term protective aims of the UK Counter-Terrorism Strategy

Deferentially private tagging recommendation based on topic model

Tagging recommender system allows Internet users to annotate resources with personalized tags and provides users the freedom to obtain recommendations. However, It is usually confronted with serious privacy concerns, because adversaries may re-identify a user and her/his sensitive tags with only a little background information. This paper proposes a privacy preserving tagging release algorithm, PriTop, which is designed to protect users under the notion of differential privacy. The proposed PriTop algorithm includes three privacy preserving operations: Private Topic Model Generation structures the uncontrolled tags, Private Weight Perturbation adds Laplace noise into the weights to hide the numbers of tags; while Private Tag Selection finally finds the most suitable replacement tags for the original tags. We present extensive experimental results on four real world datasets and results suggest the proposed PriTop algorithm can successfully retain the utility of the datasets while preserving privacy. © 2014 Springer International Publishing

2017 GREAT Day Program

SUNY Geneseo’s Eleventh Annual GREAT Day.https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/program-2007/1011/thumbnail.jp

The lobbying of Chinese elite universities

Despite the growing research on policy lobbying in China, little is known about Chinese research universities’ perspectives, strategies and interactions with the government in their efforts to influence higher education policies and advance their individual and collective interests. Their lobbying practices have long been hidden from the public view and difficult to research. Yet, the elite Chinese research universities have accumulated capacity to exert influence, and their discreet lobbying of government institutions has in fact become prevalent and is one of the most significant parts of university–government relations. This study investigates how the leading Chinese research universities interact with the central government to influence policies of crucial importance to their operations. In particular, it explores the strategies and forms of agency the institutions develop to exploit the loopholes of a fragmented central bureaucracy, and identifies the key factors and ‘rules of the game’ that shape their lobbying behaviour and define their patterns of interaction with the state. It asks how successful they are vis-à-vis the authoritarian state in a tight regulatory environment, and the potential implications of their activism for the current political structure. My study relies on a unique set of empirical evidence which includes 48 personal interviews with university top leaders and executives from a range of leading research universities, as well as with government officials. An in-depth analysis of these interviews and other previously inaccessible materials yields remarkable findings. It reveals two salient factors framing the university–state interactions: the need and capacity to monitor, navigate and penetrate an opaque central power structure within the state bureaucracy and the regulatory environment of the higher education sector; and the contingencies that create strategic opportunities and/or major crises. When the central power structure and regulatory environment are rigid, taking advantage of or reacting to any contingencies becomes necessary for any effective actions. ‘Lobbying authoritarianism’ is the result of the hybrid nature of universities in China’s political system: they need autonomy to modernise their operations and gain international and domestic prestige while at the same time remaining dependent on the government’s ideology, financial control, and political will. Their strategic and contingent activism is unlikely to lead, singlehandedly, to any significant structural changes. Yet, through lobbying, these institutions have pushed policy boundaries and engineered incremental modifications to the system demonstrating a remarkable capacity to produce specific opportunities and influence individual decisions. Their lobbying strategies may also produce an enduring impact on policymaking, increasing officials’ reliance and acceptance of bottom-up inputs and facilitating a more inclusive and rational approach in the bureaucracy. These gradual steps may altogether lead to a more vibrant education sector, and ultimately, an evolution of the system and a more open society. This original work advances our understanding about the practices of lobbying authoritarianism and of university behaviour in this field. It also provides new insights and facilitates future research on the major phenomena of the changing role and nature of the central state and of the role and nature of the elite research universities in China. Keywords: policy, lobbying, policy influencing, lobby group, political strategies, research universities, higher education lobbying, higher education policy, Chinese governance, Chinese political system, Chinese state, state-society relation